What Do We Want?

Humans seem to be struggling everyday with different questions

Which school should I choose?

Which job offer should I take?

Should I marry her?

Should I eat this?

Should I go to this restaurant or that restaurant?

Should I make babies?

Should I call him ?

Should I take this route or that route?

It is confusion all around.

Then we look at the animals living in the wild, far away from human effect.

They don't seem to have these kind of confusions.

They know what they need to eat.

They know when to mate to make babies.

They can easily migrate from Alaska to Hawaii without using navigation to give a birth.

They can also live in Hawaii with no food more than 3 months because their food is not there

They know that If they eat fish in Hawaii, It is no good for them.

It seems animals are more knowledgeable about themselves and what they need more than we do

What's wrong with us? What do we want?

We are all confused because we hardly know what is good for us.

We hardly know what we REALLY want?

Famous philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said "Man can do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants"

He basically says humans are not free as much as they think. He is questioning human's will power.

Have you ever thought of that?

Why do you want things?

Why are you attracted to certain things and not attracted to others?

This is something we can see easily in personal relationships.

We are all attracted to different people, sometimes we want somebody that is so bad for us and we can't prevent that desire and we can't leave that person.

We really don't choose who we fall in love with. It just happens outside of our consciousness.

If you are a person with weight issues you can feel this in different way.

You want to be skinny but you also want to eat so much. You have 2 conflicting desires.

If you are on a diet you eat salad instead of french fries but rest of the day you feel unsatisfied and unhappy.

You might lose weight but if the desire for french fries is there, it means that you did not kill the desire, you just hid it under somewhere. With everything that is suppressed, that thing you hid, will come out even more powerful at one point in your life. That's why many people with weight issues lose weight and gain again..

They go to the extremes thinking that they can change their desire but extremes make the desire even more powerful. They struggle with this desire all their lives.

You know there is only one way to solve this. You need to make yourself want to eat salad instead of french fries. If you could only rule what you want.

As you can see this is a very complex subject because we know that eating healthy and less is very good for us.If we eat less

1-We spend less money

2-We stay younger and we are more energetic because digestion system works less and we don't need crazy exercises to melt the calories we eat. So our body is less used, so it is younger and healthier .

3-We don't have to think about dieting all the time. Then we can use this brain energy on other important things

4-We will be lighter, we can move faster, easier and we will be more flexible

You see so many good things come from just eating little bit less, but we still can't convince ourselves to eat less? On the conscious level we know what we want: "We want to be healthy and skinny" but on some unconscious level we actually don't want this.

We are in conflict with ourselves and the one under our skin seems to be ruling us.

It seems it is the real powerful one who decides what we want.

It is powerful but not very smart because its decision is faulty.

It actually does not know what we really need.

At the end what we think we want is not actually what we want. That is our ultimate problem. Not knowing that part of ourselves that is the basic motive in everything we do.

It does not matter how smart we are, how many PHDs we have, how many mathematical problems we solve, or how rich we got. This is earthly intelligence and it has nothing to do with our personality and habits. The real intelligence is that part that rules our lives. If we have issues with that intelligence we are in a big trouble and we are screwed.

There was a very famous business man who were very successful building up many businesses and he was ruling over 100,000 workers. Although he was very successful ruling all these people and businesses, he could not stop eating at nights which was very harmful for his health. He simply could not rule himself although he had lots of power and money..

Do you know what I am talking about?